Bluegrass -- Congratulations to Lilly Pavlak, honored by the IBMA with Distinguished Achievement Award

Lilly Pavlak at the European Bluegrass festival in La Roche sur Foron, France, 2009. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

My friend Lilly Pavlak is being honored by the IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association) with its Distinguished Achievement Award -- an honor, states the IBMA, that "recognizes individuals in the bluegrass music industry who have fostered the music’s image with developments that will broaden the genre’s recognition and accessibility."

Lilly and me after an all-night Tramp event...

Lilly was born in the Czech Republic, but since 1968 has been living in Switzerland. She is a hardcore bluegrass fan as well as constant chronicler, in words and pictures, of the scene -- and also sometimes works as an agent for groups.

I met her in 2004 when I was first exploring the European country/western/bluegrass scene. She was my own guide into the bluegrass scene in the Czech Republic (and elsewhere in Europe) literally taking me by the hand on some occasions to introduce me to people and events. She also brought me in to the Czech Tramping scene -- we spent a couple of memorable nights at all-night Tramp meetings and singathons.....

Here's what the IBMA says about her in its Press Release about the awards:

An active journalist for more than three decades who has been enormously important in telling the European bluegrass story in the U.S. (and vice versa), Pavlak is first and foremost a hardcore bluegrass fan who has devoted a large portion of her life and energy to promoting the music and artists she loves. The first American artist Pavlak heard in Czechoslovakia was Pete Seeger, in 1964. “I had never seen a live American before,” Lilly recalls. “We learned the worst things about ‘American imperialists’ in school and some people even believed they ate little children! After the first tones of the banjo, I knew this was the strange instrument from the hillbilly music I liked so much. That was a defining moment for me, and for the bluegrass movement that followed. Nowadays the Czech Republic claims the highest concentration of bluegrass musicians on earth!”

In 1975 Pavlak went to her first folk festival at Lenzburg Castle in Switzerland. The next day she flew to America for the first time, later returning with 20 pounds of bluegrass LPs and a guitar. She taped the albums and sent cassettes to her “Tramp Music” friends behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia—which was their only opportunity to hear bluegrass for 12 years. On a shoestring budget, Pavlak has returned to the States and Canada many times to hear and write about bluegrass music. She subscribed to American bluegrass publications and bought music to educate herself and her friends in Europe about new bands and trends. Lilly is one of the original members of the Swiss Bluegrass Music Association and the Bluegrass Association of the Czech Republic. Despite health issues in recent years, Pavlak attends nearly every bluegrass event in central Europe, sending reviews and photos to the bluegrass press around the world. “I feel home is where the heart is, and my heart is where good music is,” Lilly says. “I was always kind of a bridge between East and West, trying to put musicians from different countries together and make them friends.”

Lilly taking pix at La Roche. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

 In addition to Lilly, the Distinguished Achievement awards went to Bill Knowlton, Geoff Stelling, Roland White, and Greg Cahill, past president of IBMA and former chairman of the IBMA board of directors, who has brought his band Special Consensus to Europe many times in the thirty-six years of its existence. 

I wrote about some of the adventures Lilly and I had on several occasions -- including in an article about the Czech bluegrass and tramping scene for The New Leader, which also forms a chapter in my book "Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere)":

Lilly left Czechoslovakia after the Soviet-led invasion in 1968 and has lived in Switzerland more or less since then. For years, starting in 1975, she made tapes of bluegrass music from American LPs and sent them to her friends in Czechoslovakia. At the time, it was difficult, if not impossible, to obtain original American recordings. Lilly's friends copied and recopied her tapes and passed them around from player to player, like secret, even subversive, messages from across the global divide. Indeed, during the darkest years of communist rule, singing American-style music often became an oblique way of expressing protest against the regime.

Lilly was not able to return to Czechoslovakia until 1987, but when she did, she found poignant evidence of how widespread her influence had become. During that homecoming trip, she said, "I hitch-hiked toward the Oslavka River, and the people in the car that stopped for me were listening to a bluegrass tape. It was very familiar to me. I knew exactly what the next song would be -- once, long ago, I had put this tape together for a Czech friend. I asked the people where they had gotten it, and they told me that a friend of their friend had gotten from his friend. And so, after 12 years, I listened to my own tape again. The quality was terrible, but it was bluegrass, and I was home again."

Lilly's involvement with the music began, as it did for many other Czech fans and musicians, in the so-called Tramp Movement, a uniquely Czech outdoors and music subculture that originated in the 1920s and is still going fairly strong. Tramping grew out of the Boy Scout movement and was particularly influenced by the back-to-nature Woodcraft Indian Movement founded in 1901 by the Canadian author and naturalist Ernest Thomas Seton.

Czech tramps were not American-style hoboes, but for the most part urbanites who took the train out of big cities on Fridays and spent their weekends "living free" -- hiking, canoeing, sleeping under the stars and sitting around campfires, strumming guitars and singing. They called it "going to America," and many romanticized the American west, taking inspiration from western movies and novels. Czech tramps often dressed in cowboy hats and bandanas, gave their camp sites American names and decorated them with totem poles and other hybrid American Indian symbols and imagery.

"People couldn't travel, so they took the romance and made it at home," Lilly told me. "It came from books -- Jack London, John Steinbeck, and the romance of the wild west, Alaska and so on. Because people couldn't travel, they thought about it, and they tried to live their dreams."

Tramp songs, meanwhile, evolved from the informal stuff of campfire camaraderie into a full-blown genre of Czech popular music, merging local folk traditions with American folk songs, country music, cowboy songs, jazz and pop. A recent CD compilation of tramp songs originally recorded between 1920 and 1939 features performances by groups with names like Settlers Club, Camp Boys and Westmen. The cover of its information booklet features drawings of totem poles surrounding a sepia photograph of a group of young men strumming guitars and seated in the woods outside a log cabin bearing the name "Hudson" spelled out above its door.

The tramp movement remained strong under communism, despite periodic attempts by the authorities to regulate it or stamp it out.

    

"The dominant official opinion always was that tramps were relics of capitalist society and, as such, shall be given no rest until they would disappear from the face of the better socialist world," wrote Pavel Hubka, an amateur historian of tramping. "But they never did, despite vexation on the part of communist police and state Security."

Lilly described to me how, when she was 15, she and her sister were arrested when on a tramping jaunt in Slovakia and accused of spreading American ideology. They were harshly interrogated, and friends of theirs were sent to prison. "They beat me until the blood flowed," she told me.

In June, I accompanied Lilly to what is called a "tramp potlach" -- an all night sing-a-thon held around a blazing bonfire and well lubricated with freely flowing beer. The term derives from "potlatch" -- the term for the ceremony among native cultures in the Pacific Northwest at which hosts give away their possessions to their guests. The potlach I attended was held to celebrate the 45th anniversary of a tramp club near Brno that Lilly had belonged to as a teenager. There must have been 300 people present, most of them appearing to be in their 50s or 60s and most of them dressed in the green army surplus that has replaced cowboy gear as typical tramp attire. Former members had come from as far away as Canada to mark the occasion.

We gathered around a five-foot tall bonfire in a lush meadow clearing on the Bubrova River that had served for decades as the club's regular camp site. At the edge of the clearing, four totem poles built by club members stood amid a tall pine forest, and a small tepee was set up next to a log cabin very similar to the one pictured on the tramp music CD information booklet. At dusk, participants held a ritual ceremony to light the bonfire, and then the singing began. At first, individuals stepped forward to sing favorite songs. They were cheered by the crowd and presented with wooden plaques bearing painted images of Indian, trapper or woodland scenes. As night fell, the entire group joined in, singing song after song after song, straight through until daybreak. M

ost of them had lilting melodies with a regular beat -- real "campfire songs."  There must have been a dozen people with guitars, and, as far as I could tell, no song was ever sung twice.

"You have 10,000 tramping songs, you know," Lilly told me. "Every group has their own songs, and we have some very good songwriters. You cannot count the music. I could have gone on singing for three days without stopping."

In 1964, Lilly was present at a seminal performance that electrified tramp music fans and changed the face of the Czech acoustic music scene. It was a concert by Pete Seeger, the second of two concerts that the American folk legend performed in Czechoslovakia following a tour of the Soviet Union.

"I had never seen a living American before, and at school we learned the worst things about the 'American imperialists,'" Lilly has recalled. "Some people even believed that they ate little children!" What's more, she said, "Pete sang a lot of songs we knew from tramp music, and so I realized that they must be American originals, not just tramp songs. That was the defining moment not just for me, but for the entire bluegrass movement that followed."

What particularly struck her and other fans were the appearance and sound of Seeger's long-necked, five-string banjo. According to legend, Seeger's performances in Prague and Brno marked the first time after World War II that a five-string banjo was seen and heard to be played live in Czechoslovakia. Lilly and other fans have recalled to me how they would listen to "hillbilly music" on the "forbidden but beloved" American Armed Forces Radio, beamed from West Germany across the Iron Curtain, and try to figure out what instrument made the distinctive, ringing sound that was so different from that of the guitars, mandolins and tenor banjos already common in the Czechoslovakia.

As soon as Seeger touched the strings, Lilly said, "I knew that this was the strange instrument I liked so much from the hillbilly music."

A Czech musician named Marko Cermak, who was active in the tramp music scene, became so excited that -- according to his own and other accounts -- he built his own long-necked, five-string banjo by studying photographs taken of Seeger at the Prague concert and blown up to life size. Cermak went on to become one of Czechoslovakia's first banjo virtuosi, the father of five-string banjo playing in the country -- godfather in effect to the 65 banjo players who set the record in Caslav this summer for unison playing.

Cermak also founded one of Czechoslovakia's first American-style country and bluegrass groups, the Greenhorns. The Greenhorns became extremely influential by playing Czech language versions of American folk songs, copying arrangements they heard on American Forces Radio. "The Orange Blossom Special" became "Oranzovy Expres," "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" became "Slama v Botach," and "I've Been Working on the Railroad" became "Pracoval Jsem na Trati." In doing so, they, and similar groups, brought these songs firmly into the local musical tradition, fostering a total assimilation of many songs into the Czech repertoire. Even today, many American folk songs are considered to be traditional Czech tramp songs -- or even believed to be Czech originals that were taken to America.

This assimilation was intensified by force after the 1968 invasion, when official censorship made much of America's cultural production taboo. The censors permitted groups to play bluegrass, folk and country music, which performers convinced them was the music of the "oppressed" American proletariat. Still, when performing in public they had to sing in Czech, and censors scrutinized the lyrics. Music groups were also forbidden to have English names, so the Greenhorns had to change themselves into the "Zelenaci," and a fellow group, the Rangers, became "Plavci."

Italy -- Out "Ovest" in Italia

An Italian cowboy at a ranch near Rome. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

A friend of mine told me the other day about how much he enjoyed a few days' stay this summer at a dude ranch in Italy -- Silver Creek Ranch not far from Parma.

I took a look at the web site -- and I think I may have to go try it out myself....I find that I already missed some interesting looking events in Italy.

Not to mention various other ranches and "wild western spaces" -- all seemingly linked to the horse-riding and competition community.

Italian Cowboys in the Wild West imaginario... Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

There's Seventeen Ranch, for example, which hosts a Ranch Academy -- this is run by Andrea (Drew) Mischianti, an Italian Cowboy whom I met some years ago when he worked at  the ranchlike Tenuta Santa Barbara ranch near Rome and was involved in organizing "western games" there -- these  included rodeo-style riding competitions as well as a variety of exhibitions, stands, etc. I was always planning to go there to see the working ranch -- on my cellphone I still have a text message from him announcing that there would be branding that I could visit. (It doesn't seem as if these games still go on.)

"Drew" Mischianti some years ago. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

He has spent much time out west in the U.S., and for awhile wrote a column for an Italian Western magazine called Western Side (which doesn't seem to exist any more). Now he edits his own cowboy magazine (in Italian) called Cowboy Journal, which runs everything from recipes to adventure tales.

Italy -- Death of Italian country singer George McAnthony

 

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I've just caught up with the sad news that the Italian country singer George McAnthony died last month of a heart attack. He was only 45. George was the first European country singer I met when I first started exploring the "imaginary wild west."  I saw him perform a couple of times and did a lengthy interview with him -- he was a nice guy and he and his story helped trigger my interest in the imaginary wild west phenomenon. (For his web site click HERE)

George was born Georg Spitaler in 1966 near Bolzano in the Dolomite Mountains of the mainly German-speaking South Tyrol/Alto Adige region of northern Italy. He grew up an avid fan of the European-made western movies based on the popular “Winnetou” novels of the 19th century German author Karl May. As a teenager he fell in love with American country-western music and began roaring around his village on a motorcycle, blasting country music from its loudspeakers and wearing a cowboy hat and boots. In the 1990s after working as a carpenter and spending a couple years as a volunteer aid worker in Ethiopia, Georg reinvented himself as George McAnthony and went on the road fulltime as a country and western singer. He chose McAnthony as his stage name in honor of his late father, Anton. “I wanted a name that sounded American,” he told me, “and this made sense.”

McAnthony toured Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland as a "country one man band," complete with a black Stetson, leather fringes, a painted stage backdrop of Monument Valley and a souvenir stall selling cheap turquoise jewelry, “George McAnthony” bolo ties, cowboy hats and his own CDs, a couple of which were recorded in Nashville. He played street fairs, horse shows, beer festivals, and outdoor summer fêtes in medieval village piazzas.

He died while spending the day on the beach at Terracina, south of Rome, before a scheduled appearance in the town of Vico (at a country festival).
I first saw McAnthony perform at a rural inn in central Italy that was sponsoring a “Country Festa” at which guests sported paper Indian headdresses and called each other “pardner.” McAnthony wrote much of his own material, in English. His songs stressed what he described as socially engaged, “positive images” – racial harmony, animal rights, world peace and safeguarding the environment. “I live the country way of life, and I love country music, and this is the way I do it,” he sang, with a distinct non-native accent, in his song “Country Way of Life.” He went on, “You don’t have to kill the Indians, or the people of Africa...”

The German blog Country Music International has put up a tribute page to George with lots of information on him, and lots of links.

Country REALLY Eastern -- Country Music Festival coming up in China!

Illustration from Hunan web site

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Country REALLY Eastern -- there's another country music festival coming up in China...  The second Zhangjiajie International Country Music Week - will take place at the Wulingyuan scenic area, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Hunan Province, Sept. 10 to 16. The hosts of the event are China's Ministry of Culture and the Hunan provincial government.

According to the Hunan Government web site, more than  bands from more than two dozen countries have signed on -- but I haven't yet seen a list or program.

The First Zhangjiajie International Country Music Week came off at Huanglong Cave Square from May 14 to 18 in 2009, serving as a milestone of integrated development of tourism and culture.

The six-day music week this year aims to display and exchange country music across the whole world, and promote the development of national cultures. At present, thirty-one overseas bands consisting of 392 musicians from twenty-six countries and regions have been identified, while the list of eight domestic bands of the minority nationality is still up in the ai　

According to Ye Wenzhi, general planner of Zhangjiajie International Country Music Week, efforts will be made to develop the music week into regular music festival and foster Zhangjiajie into an international brand as well as a holy land of country music after holding three to five music weeks.

The China Daily quotes an official as saying they want to make the locale a major country music venue.

Ye Wenzhi, general manager of the Huanglongdong Tourist Corp, one of the event's organizers, said, "Every effort needs to be made to turn the music festival into a regular event and to develop Zhangjiajie into an international country music venue."

Here's a report about the first Country Music Festival in Zhangijajie in 2009, noting that there were country bands from Austria and Australia and -- not unsurprisingly -- John Denver's songs were hits.

Musicians from all over the world are meeting here at Zhangjiajie, a tourist destination in Hunan Province. The stage was set against high mountains to showcase talents of 24 country-music bands from neighboring countries like Japan and South Korea, and countries across the Pacific like the U.S. and Argentina as well. There were also eight distinguished performing troupes from domestic ethnic groups in Xinjiang Uygyur and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regions as well as Yunnan, Guizhou and Hunan Provinces.

Country music was first created in the Southern states of the US in the 1920s and was originally popular among country folk. For this festival week, country music universally refers to all styles of folk music in the world with distinct national flavor.

The music feast featured music performed simultaneously at six distinct scenic areas and offered many other activities, such as a bonfire party.

The opening ceremony started with Hunan folk music performed jointly by Santa Fe Art Ensemble from America and a Zhangjiajie local troupe. Tom Maguire, the conductor of the American ensemble, says he enjoys the collaboration with Chinese folk artists.

"I feel very fortunate to be able to be with those wonderful musicians. It is amazing to be able do this kind of festival. I hope I can come back."
And Xiedan from the Zhangjiajie local troupe is honored to take part in the opening ceremony and communicate with foreign performers.

"There's no national boundary in the world of music. Although we speak different languages, we express the same wish through music. We performed together with musicians from Santa Fe in a traditional Zhangjiajie folk song "Lampstand on Masang Tree". They have different understandings of the music. We learned a lot from them."

Many other oversea participants also treated music fans with a real dose of country music. The Pond Pirates band from Austria gave Chinese audience members a taste of Austrian contemporary band genre, with their mixed influences of rock, ska and hip-hop.

Depressing drum sounds and slow dance moves characterized a dance troupe named Awa dance Performance Team from Japan, emphasizing a mysterious side to the eastern culture. Naka Tani Hirosni is a 64-year-old performer in the troupe.

"Awa dance is a famous Japanese folk dance with a history of more than 400 years. People in our county would dance when they hear this music. We're honored to perform our music here to foreign audiences."

And audiences were captivated each time an African performance was given by the National troupe of Benin. They heard sounds they had never heard of in real life. Huang Xiaoqing is a visitor from Shenzhen.

"They're gifted musicians. Their music is passionate and infectious. I cannot prevent myself from getting onto the stage to dance with them. It's a happy experience to enjoy the beautiful scenary as well as other countries' music culture."

Grant Luhrs, an Australian country music band, brings a country classic by American singer John Denver.

"We know that in China, John Denver as a county music performer is very popular. And we've just come off stage now on a John Denver classic song called "leaving on a jet plane".

"Country Roads, take me home", another country hit by John Denver, was chosen as the theme song of the music week, performed by two American bands Lucy Angle and Magan Sheehan.

Along with these blended tunes of East and West, famous French vocalist Cyril Niccolai also charmed the Chinese audience by singing a hit mandarin song - Teresa Teng's 'The Moon Represents My Heart'.

"It's very interesting. It proves that China is opening to the world. It's like the Olympics for music. It's an incredible mix of culture. You can talk with African people. You can talk with Greek people. And it's amazing how people connected with music. I have no religion personally. I just believe in music and the power of music and power of man. Music can connect everybody. And I'm very proud to be here."

Spectators were moved both by the music and the location. They danced, with large grins on their faces, some singing along with the performers on stage.

It's a refreshing combination of natural beauty, international faces and, most of all, music from all over the world at the Zhangjiajie International Country Music Week. Zhao Xiaoming, mayor of Zhangjiajie and spokesman of the music week, says the event will be a regular international festival held once every two years.

"The International country music week builds up its platform in the beautiful Zhangjiajie city, aiming at combining professional and folk music and showing and communicating country music from all over the world. Thus, we can inherit and carry forward the art of country music and promote cultural exchange."

The country music week was expected to build the image of Zhangjiajie as a holy land for all styles of country music from all over the world.

Laos -- Country Music from Thailand

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

A radio station is going to be beaming country music into Laos from Thailand in order to boost business and adverting, according to an article in the Thai newspaper/web site The Nation.

R Siam, RS's country-music subsidiary, will use Sabaidee TV to penetrate Laos to boost advertisers' confidence to spend more money on its satellite channel as well as to seek business partners to provide music-download services. "Laos has high potential for the Thai country-music business because its people understand Thai culture and language, while most of them are able to access both free and satellite television services from Thailand," said Soopachai Nillawan, managing director of R Siam. A survey by the company found that Sabaidee TV was the most popular satellite channel in Laos.[...] Soopachai said the overall country-music market in Thailand was worth about Bt1.5 billion annually, of which R Siam accounted for 45 per cent.

I don't know anything about the country music scene in Thailand, but I've written on this blog about the general wild west scene in Thailand, including at least one wild west theme park.  Erik Cohen, an emeritus professor of anthropology (and expert on tourism studies) at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who lives in Thailand  has included a lengthy -- and fascinating -- description and analysis of "Thai Cowboys" in his book Explorations in Thai Tourism, published in 2008 by Emerald, Bingley

American Indian Workshop -- Call for Papers

By Ruth Ellen Gruber


The 33rd American Indian Workshop conference will take place in Zurich next April. A website has been set up and a call for papers has gone out, with the deadline for submissions Oct. 31. The topic will be "Presentation and Representation Revisited: Places, Media, Disciplines."

The American Indian Workshop started in 1980 and has become the most important scholarly platform for European researchers into issues related to the Native Peoples of North America. Since the beginning this experience has been shared with colleagues from North America. By now the American Indian Workshop is the most important international conference on American Indian and Inuit Studies in the world.

The 33rd American Indian Workshop "Presentation and Representation Revisited: Media, Places, Disciplines" held in Zurich from April 12 – 15, 2012 will be organized by the following two institutions:
The Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich

The Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich / Völkerkundemuseum der Universität Zürich, formerly the “Ethnographic Collections / Sammlung für Völkerkunde”, was renamed in 1971, when it also became part of the School of Humanities. In close cooperation with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, it supports research and teaching, and puts up special exhibitions with emphasis on aspects of ethnoreligion, cultural history, art history and technology.
The North America Native Museum (NONAM)

The Nordamerika Native Museum (NONAM) developed out of a private collection acquired by the Education Department of the City of Zurich in 1963. The collection is strictly limited to objects from the USA and Canada. Under the name of “Indianer- museum” it served for four decades primarily to instruct schoolchildren about Native America. After its relocation and enlargement in 2003 the museum changed its name to NONAM. Since then it has played an increasingly important and visible role, both nationally and internationally, as one of the few European museums devoted solely to the Native Peoples of North America.

Czech Republic -- In the Studio with Druha Trava

In the studio. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

In mid-July I spent two days in a Prague studio helping record the vocal tracks for a new CD by the Czech country/bluegrass/fusion group Druha Trava. Founded 20 years ago, in 1991, DT and its various members have brought out more than a score of albums, including several in English -- see a history of the group by Lilly Pavlak, posted on the European Bluegrass Blog by clicking HERE

But the new Druha Trava CD  -- tentatively titled "Shuttle to Bethlehem" after one of the songs (the inspiration was Bethlehem PA, not the "other" one) is the first that will primarily feature English-language versions of singer-songwriter Robert Krestan’s distinctive original songs.

I made the translations, and the studio session was the culmination of a collaborative project that had taken more than five years to come to fruition.
 
During the recording session, we were joined in the studio by Lee Bidgood -- a wonderful musician who did his PhD on Czech bluegrass and now teaches at East Tennessee State University, which has a  Bluegrass, Old-Time and Country Music Studies program -- and his colleague from ETSU, the documentary filmmaker Shara Lange, who are making a documentary on Czech bluegrass. They filmed the session and also interviewed Robert, banjoist Lubos Malina and me.

Lee and me when we met in 2004

Lee is one of the first people I got to know what I was starting to follow the Czech bluegrass scene -- we met at the Caslav bluegrass festival in 2004 and I recall how wonderful it was to talk to someone who also was looking at the scene and the music from the "outside" and considering the same questions that I was.

While he was doing research in CZ a few years ago, Lee kept a wonderful blog  in which he described music and musicians and reflected on the history and trajectory of the music in the Czech Republic. He hasn't posted anything lately, but it is a terrific resource.

I wrote about the Prague recording session this week in a post on the Arty Semite blog of the Forward, describing a bit of the complex process of translation. I started translating Krestan's songs into English in 2006 and continued working on them as one facet of the "Sauerkraut Cowboys/Indian Dreams" project for which I had  a Guggenheim Fellowship and NEH summer grant.

My first goal was basic: I loved the Czech originals, but I wanted to know what they meant. As I started working, though, it seemed much more logical — and in fact, even easier — to put them in a rhyming form that could be sung. The process was surprisingly straightforward.

A young student in Prague, David Kraus, supplied me with word-for-word equivalents. David’s father Tomas is an old friend, the secretary of the Federation of Czech Jewish Communities, but he also knows a lot about the Czech country music scene. In Communist times Tomas’s late brother [Ronald Kraus] produced, wrote and translated songs for several key Czech tramp and country-style groups [including the iconic band KTO]..

I took the words that David gave me, compared them to the rhythm of the original Czech lyrics, and listened over and over to the original songs in order to capture their meaning and rhyme structure as well as to fit them to the melodies.

Czech is a more bristly language than English, with quite different sounds and cadences, and Krestan uses words for their tonality as well as meaning. But remarkably, my lyrics got to a point where they seemed to click into place. Later, Krestan and I spent a couple of sessions together tweaking the English to improve both nuance and “singability.”

In the studio, as Krestan sang into the microphone, I stood in the sound booth with DT’s banjo player Lubos Malina, who is co-producing the CD with Nashville-based Steve Walsh. Five years on, it was the first time I heard the songs sung in their final form. (Walsh oversaw the recording of the instrumentals in Nashville last spring.) They sounded, well, right. I focused on recording levels and intonation, but I couldn’t keep a goofy smile off my face.

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/140290/#ixzz1TEAt1c7T

Here's a brief video clip I took of one of the recording session takes of the song "Before We Say Good-Bye".

And here's the original Czech version, sung by the band performing outside Prague castle in 2009, when President Obama was there meeting with Czech leaders.